Before I made the decision to ditch Windows Vista in favor of Ubuntu Linux, I asked myself what I would really be giving up. The only answer I could come up with was the marvelous Evernote client, which is not distributed in a Linux version. While the Web interface retains allmost all of the functionality of the client, it of course by definition lacks the convenience of a local copy of your Evernote database. With a little research, however, I am happy to announce that I am now running the latest Evernote 3.1.0.1225 in Ubuntu 9.04 using Wine. Wine is a Linux program that allows you to install and run many Windows programs in Linux. You can see that a couple of graphical components are a little wonky (the black boxes around the toolbar icons), but overall the functionality is intact. In fact, I took the above screen shot with Evernote. My database, over 1GB, synchronized without a hitch. And the automatic update feature even works properly as well. All in all, I'm extremely pleased.

Installing Wine in Ubuntu is very simple. Go to Applications > Add/Remove and type "wine" in the search box. Click the check box, click "Apply," and the program will install. To install Evernote, just download the installer file and double-click it. A launcher icon should appear on the desktop, and Evernote will also appear in Applications > Wine > Programs.

I found that at first, the text in the Evernote List View was not displaying. This was remedied with the simple registry fix below:

I may even try running some other Windows programs in Wine at some point. Maybe. But there are so many excellent native Linux apps, I may not need to.

I've been  doing some research on Web-based file storage, sharing and sync services. It's a very competitive market with many pricing models and features within services. I find Twitter to be a useful tool for tracking the comments of people who actually use these services... something which is difficult to do with Google. Google will mostly give you blog posts and press releases, which are good sources of information to begin with. However, I find that advertised features don't always match up to user experience, and for tracking user impressions, Twitter is better.

Seesmic is a Web-based client for Twitter which makes it easy to perform and save searches, track replies, or follow individual tweeple within a configurable modular page. I think it is a really handy tool, and the best part is you can use it without installing anything on your computer.

Do you have a favorite Web client for Twitter? Leave a comment below.